Plants are mainly multicellular, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. The term is today generally limited to the green plants, which form an unranked clade Viridiplantae (Latin for “green plants”). This includes the flowering plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and the green algae, and excludes the red and brown algae. Historically, plants formed one of two kingdoms covering all living things that were not animals, and both algae and fungi were treated as plants; however all current definitions of “plant” exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as the prokaryotes (the archaea and bacteria).

Greenplants have cell walls containing cellulose and obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts, derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria. Their chloroplasts contain chlorophylls a and b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce normal amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are characterized by sexual reproduction and alternation of generations, although asexual reproduction is also common.

There are about 300315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260290 thousand, are seed plants.Green plants provide a substantial proportion of the world’s molecular oxygen and are the basis of most of Earth’s ecologists, especially on land. Plants that produce grains, fruits and vegetables form humankind’s basic foodstuffs, and have been domesticated for millennia. Plants play many roles in culture. They are used as ornaments and, until recently and in great variety,they have served as the source of most medicines and drugs. The scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology.

Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things were traditionally divided; the other is animals. The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle (384 BC 322 BC), who distinguished between plants, which generally do not move, and animals, which often are mobile to catch their food. Much later, when Linnaeus (17071778) created the basis of the modern system of scientific classification, these two groups became the kingdoms Vegetabilia (later Metaphyta or Plantae) and Animalia (also called Metazoa). Since then, it has become clear that the plant kingdom as originally defined included several unrelated groups, and the fungi and several groups of algae were removed to new kingdoms. However, these organisms are still often considered plants, particularly in popular contexts.

Outside of formal scientific contexts, the term “plant” implies an association with certain traits, such as being multicellular, possessing cellulose, and having the ability to carry out photosynthesis.[7][8]